The Land Warrior Program represents one aspect of the Army's efforts to modernize the soldier. The Land Warrior Program will make rapid deployable light forces more effective on the future battlefield. Specifically, an integrated, modular fighting system for the infantryman is being developed by employing existing and developing technologies. Examples of Land Warrior objectives include reducing weight and cost by consolidating functionality, integrating components from similar systems, and providing capability enhancements. Thus, the Land Warrior system includes everything the ground soldier wears and carries integrated into a close combat fighting system which enhances his situational awareness, lethality, survivability, mobility, sustainment, and training.
One key element of the Land Warrior program comprises a sophisticated communication system that allows every soldier to know where he is, where the enemy is, where his buddies are and what he is to do. A military organization is characterized by its hierarchy, which generally comprises a number of specific roles as well as discrete subgroups of individuals. Specific roles within the military organization include hierarchies of leaders, platoons, divisions and the like. In addition, the organization also comprises subgroups or subsets, for example, team leaders or 2nd squad members. Effective communication within such an organization requires the ability to send messages from individual to individual as well as to all individuals having a specific role or being a member of a specific subgroup. Together with this ability to target messages, efficiency and clarity require that messages not be delivered to roles or subgroups for which they are not intended.
Prior art systems utilize routing protocols suitable for mobile clients. One example is On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP). This process requires the propagation of route discovery messages and corresponding acknowledgements to build routing tables. The routes generated by this general process do not support bi-directional communications because ODMRP is designed to support multicast messages that are one-to-many in nature. This general process also requires the discovery and maintenance of routes for each of the several group membership multicast addresses that are associated with a particular destination node.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a wireless communication method for delivering messages to specific roles or subgroups within any organization or team having defined roles or subgroups. It is another object of the invention to provide such communications in such a way as to allow bi-directional communications between the various roles and subgroups. It is a further object of the invention to optimize the routing of information within a multidisciplinary organization.